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PETER McVERRY SJ
REALITY CHECK
PETER McVERRY SJ
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When I was growing up, Hell was very much a part of our religious education. Missing Mass on Sunday, or entertaining an impure thought, or robbing £5 from a poor person were mortal sins (stealing from a rich person was only a venial sin!), which, if not confessed before you died, condemned you to Hell for all eternity.
The God that was taught to me was a God who is all-loving and all-caring, provided we do what God wants, but, if we fail to do so, then God’s anger would be aroused and we could be banished into Hell for all eternity, with no hope of repentance. Such a God is like an abusive partner (usually, but not always, a man) who uses violence, or the threat of violence, as the means of getting his partner to do what he wants. However, when she does what he wants, he becomes all loving and caring – this is the ‘loving phase’ of an abusive relationship. The person abused often comes to believe that they have justly earned the abuse by their own behaviour.
The existence of Hell was justified by various arguments, such as, we have justly earned it by our own behaviour; it is not God who has rejected us, it is we who have rejected God.
But we cannot be accused of rejecting something if we do not know what we are rejecting. And here on earth, our human concepts are incapable of knowing who God is, or how much God loves us. Imagine two children looking up at the stars on a clear night. One child says, “I bet those stars are five miles away.” The other says, “Don’t be stupid, they must be ten miles away.” The children are trying to express the fact that the stars are a long way away. But they have no concept of 40,000,000,000,000 kilometres! So they use concepts,
five miles and ten miles, which, in their mind, mean ‘a long way away’. But these concepts are totally incapable of expressing how far away the stars are. So too, we are incapable of understanding God’s love, as it is infinitely greater than any human experience of love.
Between us and God, there is a “cloud of unknowing”. We cannot reject God; we can only reject the inadequate images of God which human concepts have created in our minds. We will only come to know God, and fully understand the love of God, when we finally meet God face to face, and the “cloud of unknowing” is removed. So instead of being forgiven after we have repented, perhaps we
repent after we have come face to face with God, when we will then know and understand the infinite love and forgiveness of God.
A young homeless man once robbed €50 from me. When I discovered that he was the culprit, I confronted him. However, he refused to admit it. He was afraid that I would reject him and tell him I never wanted to see him again. However, I told him that I knew it was him, but I was willing to forget about it and I hoped he wouldn’t rob me again. That young man became my most loyal supporter and promised to beat up anyone who would think of robbing me! I didn’t forgive him because he repented, he repented because he saw that he had been forgiven.
To sin, then, is not to reject God, because we cannot reject God; to sin is to reject other people, to fail in love. In our criminal justice system, restorative justice is now widely recognised as a better way of addressing the harm inflicted by one person on another than assigning guilt and imposing punishment. It seeks to bring together the victim and offender in order to bring about healing. In restorative justice, people forgive and are forgiven. But to forgive and to be forgiven is at the heart of the Gospel and therefore is an indispensable characteristic of the Kingdom of God. “How often must I forgive?” asks Peter. “Not seven times but seventy times seven,” replies Jesus. Hell, then, is empty and does not need to exist.
